GUEST GALLERY

This Gallery is my platform to introduce you to work which in my own humble opinion is worth and more than worth your time. David Hanko is a young poet of my acquaintance: I'd like to say that I expect you to be hearing more of him in the coming years, but poets today tend to get noticed only if they die, sell out to the pc establishment, or dedicate their work to the muse Attitudina and release Rap albums. Combining two can boost their name recognition even more: witness Tupac Shakur. But I digress.

Where have all our heroes gone?
Are they lost, wand'ring in a
Purgatory of political correctness,
Until some literary angel
Whisks them to the heaven
Of Heracles and Hector?
Our Achilles is a heel;
Our Pericles a Narcissus in disguise.
Instead of Beowulf we have Bond;
In place of Galahad nothing more than Plath.
Our Roland is a Pankhurst and Petain:
He slays heroically not men-at-arms, but babies
And battles bravely for parking spaces at the mall.

-- David Hanko

Such dessicated poetry. The praise and censure
Of critics dangle slackly from their subject,
the hospital gown on the anorexic body
Of a frail and failing man.
Flesh wanting between
Cockled skin and flimsy bone;
Meaning lacking between
Pretentious verbose veneer and labyrinthine structure,
The minotaur of incoherency with ambuscade prepared --
in the next phrase, perhaps, or around the next comma.
Skeletal punctuation and claptrap grammar;
the trail to artistic senility blazed by
Dismembered thoughts and decapitated sentences.
Mindless and fingerless, unable to give
Abstract or concrete significance.
Dry-heaving impotent emptiness and as emptily
Claiming 'plurality of meaning.'
Saying nothing, pretending everything.
Insert meaning here:

--David Hanko